Chang Po-wei (張博崴), a medical student who died in 2011 after getting lost while climbing Baigu Mountain (白姑大山) in Nantou County, committed a fatal mistake by venturing into the area alone. The mountain rescue team from the Nantou County Fire Department did what they could in the search, necessitated by Chang’s mistake, and it is for this reason they have not been punished.
The compensation award ordered by the Taipei District Court reflects errors on the part of government. The rescue team are not to blame. Instead, the fault lies with the government and its systems, and there is much room for improvement.
Chang’s family have spent a great deal of time pursuing their claim through the courts. They plan to invest all of the compensation — NT$2.67 million (US$86,685) — in promoting education related to mountain climbing and funding mountaineering safety apparatus. The key question is: Will the court’s ruling spur the government to improve the nation’s search and rescue system, or will the public have to continue organizing rescue efforts themselves?
Firefighters have an extremely tough job and their rescue teams deserve to be highly commended. However, if rescue systems and procedures are inadequate, and the authorities have not provided adequate supervision and management, operations are likely to be disorganized.
If the court had ruled that the firefighters themselves should pay damages, or that the rescue team should pay 30 percent of the damages, this would have been grossly unfair. The court made the right decision in awarding state compensation as the government was at fault and the firefighters are blameless.
The issue of the medical care redress bill similarly involves people in different camps holding conflicting ideas and approaches. If Taiwan goes down the same road as the US, Canada and Italy, it would result in a financial black hole for the medical system. The further a nation moves toward building a compensatory system focused on individual doctors or hospitals, the more likely it is that important concepts, such as the inherent uncertainty of medical treatment or problems with medical insurance systems, are overlooked.
If people affected by of natural disasters start to claim damages from rescue workers, nobody would be willing take on such tasks.
In the UK the state provides medical treatment as a form of social welfare. Most doctors in the UK are employees of the state and compared with other professions, doctors receive relatively low pay considering what they do.
The public is keenly aware how tough it was 60 years ago, when the public health system did not exist. The government, in turn, works to make the public aware that resources are limited, treatments contain an element of risk and that doctors will never intentionally harm their patients nor refuse to treat them. Therefore, in the event of a case of gross negligence, the public must directly sue the National Health Service (NHS) for inadequate supervision or management. A member of the public cannot directly sue a doctor. Thus, it can be viewed as a form of state compensation. The bar for initiating a prosecution of the NHS is intentionally kept high, to ensure members of the public do not cause trouble needlessly, which would negatively impact upon the morale of medical workers.
In the case of Chang, the court punished the system, rather than individual rescue workers. Many in the medical profession hope that, instead of criminalizing individual doctors or nurses, the government takes the opportunity to correct mistakes with the National Health Insurance system and reforms its health policy to improve the standard of medical healthcare.
Su Kuan-pin is a professor and director of China Medical University’s Institute of Neural and Cognitive Sciences.
Translated by Edward Jones
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